Michel Foucault Quotes

The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versus individualism. The issue truth-versus-untruth is as far as possible kept in the background.

Books and all forms of writing have always been objects of terror to those who seek to suppress the truth.

The burning of an author's books, imprisonment for opinion's sake, has always been the tribute that an ignorant age pays to the genius of its time.

What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now they are content with burning my books.

Books and all forms of writing are terror to those who wish to suppress the truth.

Of all the tyrannies of humankind, the worst is that which persecutes the mind.

And why does England thus persecute the votaries of her science? Why does she depress them to the level of her hewers of wood and her drawers of water? Is it because science flatters no courtier, mingles in no political strife? ... Can we behold unmoved the science of England, the vital principle of her arts, struggling for existence, the meek and unarmed victim of political strife?

Thus identified with astronomy, in proclaiming truths supposed to be hostile to Scripture, Geology has been denounced as the enemy of religion. The twin sisters of terrestrial and celestial physics have thus been joint-heirs of intolerance and persecution—unresisting victims in the crusade which ignorance and fanaticism are ever waging against science. When great truths are driven to make an appeal to reason, knowledge becomes criminal, and philosophers martyrs. Truth, however, like all moral powers, can neither be checked nor extinguished. When compressed, it but reacts the more. It crushes where it cannot expand—it burns where it is not allowed to shine.

Persecution for opinion is the master vice of society.

This was but a prelude; where books are burnt human-beings will be burnt in the end

there are lots of would-be censors out there, and although they may have different agendas, they all want basically the same thing: for you to see the world they see...or to at least shut up about what you do see that's different. they are agents of the status quo. not necessarily bad guys, but dangerous guys if you happen to believe in intellectual freedom.

Where books are burnt, men finish up being burnt too.

It hardly matters why a library is destroyed: every banning, curtailment, shredding, plunder or loot gives rise (at least as a ghostly presence) to a louder, clearer, more durable library of the banned, looted, plundered, shredded or curtailed.

I am opposed to censorship. Censors are pretty sure fools. I have no confidence in the suppression of everyday facts.

I think the freedom to express one's views is more important than intellectual property.

The greatest danger to the State is independent intellectual criticism.

In the West, you don't get in any trouble if you tell the truth, but you still can't do it. Not only can't you tell the truth, you can't think the truth. It's just so deeply embedded, deeply instilled, that without any meaningful coercion it comes out the same way it does in a totalitarian state.

We should be wary what persecution we raise against the living labors of public men, how we spill that seasoned life of man, preserved and stored up in books, since we see a kind of homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdom; and if it extend to the whole impression, a kind of massacre, whereof the execution ends not in the slaying of an elemental life, but strikes at the ethereal and fifth essence, the breath of reason itself; slays an immortality rather than a life.

All the excitements of a prohibited book had their usual effect, one of which, as always, is to expose the fact that the censors don't know what they are talking about.

I look upon those who would deny others the right to urge and argue their position, however irksome and pernicious they may seem, as intellectual and moral cowards.

Wherever books are burned, human beings are destined to be burned too.

A forbidden writing is thought to be a certain spark of truth, that flies up in the face of them who seek to tread it out.

In two senses: One is that you cannot go on the street and shout that you are an atheist, the other is that you are never given the intellectual framework for calling your faith into question.

Laws which prescribe what everyone must believe, and forbid men to say or write anything against this or that opinion, are often passed to gratify, or rather to appease the anger of those who cannot abide independent minds.

Suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away.